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Thursday, April 24, 2008

Blogtagged

I had never heard of this term till yesterday (it sounds rather sinister and Big Brotherish), but I have now been blogtagged by the Divine Ms Baroque (she who must be obeyed). All I have to do is reveal six random things about myself. Since this may be my one and only celebrity-style request, it would be churlish to refuse. So here are the six, illustrated:

1. My Other GenreAlien is one of my favourite movies. I love a good ghost, horror or sci-fi flick.

2. ReshuffleAfter a four year hiatus, I've finally resumed running/fast walking, and have suddenly discovered what the iPod Shuffle my wife gave me as a birthday present over a year ago is REALLY for: Bowie, Bach, Santana, Tori Amos, Négresses Vertes... I'm rediscovering them all.

3. HairyI used to have VERY long hair, right down to my waist(now it's the Roddy Doyle look, what Billy Connolly called 'the Millennium Comb-over').

4. SuperstitionThere is one particular drain-cover I drive over nearly every morning. If I can get it to make a satisfying 'clunk' I tell myself the day will end on a happy note.

5. CloudsIf there was a vacancy for a cloudwatcher (a vacancy for vacancy) I'd fit the bill.

7 comments:

Lovely, absolutely lovely. That drain cover - does it have the ghostly shape of a woman, some kind of drain-sybil, around it?

You look great with the long hair. Millenium comb-over, indeed. No way. He can say that because he's kept his, but the whole point about the comb-over was how SAD it was, what a lame subterfuge. There is no subterfuge in shaving one's head, or even going for the ubiquitous number 2 or whatever.

Thanks Katy. The thing with the drain-cover is mainly the sound, that satisfying clunk (though there may be a sybil or water-sprite lurking there; why not?). You have to hit it in a certain way to get that clunk. Sometimes I miss.

I don't look TOO bad on that passport, do I? But I am not a tall person (5' 10") and my waist-length hair didn't really suit me; I looked like a walking haystack, especially if I shook my head so the parting covered my face (great to hide behind). When I worked on a building site ('worked' is proably a misnomer) with my cousin, the other guys used to call us Hansel and Gretel.

Re. shaving the head, I think there is a subterfuge (sort of), an attempt to disguise the male pattern baldness by erasing the pattern. An older friend thought I just was being vain. I told him he was right, but I preferred the slightly thuggish (or saintly) Roddy Doyle look to those neat little suade wings. I still do.

Your photos on this entry, with accompanying text suggest the future of language in this global age: pictures, the visual, are the primary medium of expression, language appears as a subtitle below them. There might be an emerging genre here too: the photo poem.

Thanks Sean. Of course, the text in the above examples is intended to be secondary to the images, similar to the copy lines in ads. The idea of photo-poems as a sub-genre interests me, though not if photos are the primary form of expression. I like the idea of both image & poem playing off/complimenting/counterpointing each other, provided the poems also have enough weight and integrity to stand on their own. A good example of this (possibly the best example) might be Fay Godwin's / Ted Hughes's 'Remains of Elmet', a perfect twinning of a great poet and equally great landscape photographer (Britain's Ansel Adams). I wonder if Les Murray ever thought of asking a photographer to work with him on his excellent 'Poems The Size of Postcards'. That might have been fruitful. Though the poems don't actually need photographs, it would have brought another dimension to the work.

The comments about the visual / literary relationship are interesting too. Having been a longtime advocate of the visual as our primary language, yet also a lover of language and all its associated powers, I'm fascinated to see what new relationships emerge over the coming years. And we haven't even mentioned music!

I don't know what new relationships may develop between poetry and music. The old one is still there of course, inevitable, primal.

I was delighted when a music student contacted me a few months ago, asking permission to use my Post Apocalyptic sonnet 'When' to explore "themes from Messiaen’s Quartet For The End Of Time." It was performed in the post-graduate concert in the Waterford New Music Festival. I am still waiting for him to send me a CD (have to email him a reminder). Here's what the Munster Express said about it:

"Ben Hanlon for his When, based on a Mark Granier poem, brought a large De La Salle Boys Choir and a small orchestra under the baton of Niall Crowley. To a steady drum-beat, the large choir, all dressed in black, filed into the chapel and the music grew in dramatic momentum with tuba and trombones before the choir sang and whispered in powerful fashion. This was an inspirational and powerful piece with additional organ work also."